A friend, Hilary Wade, has posted a terrific comment disagreeing with my comments about conservatism and the literary detective. She says:
Well, it looks like nobody else is going to say it, so I guess it's up to me. Despite the best efforts of yourself and Martin Gardner, I have to tell you that there is not, repeat not, going to be a mass G.K. Chesterton revival. It isn't going to happen. And the reason for this is that Chesterton is not, in fact, an outstanding prose writer. First-rate thinker, yes, okay, but absolutely not a first-rate writer. His style may be compared, as indeed I think it has been by Max Beerbohm, to "death by a thousand blows, not one of which quite hits the nail on the head." It's intrusive, didactic and overwritten. Consider if you will the following passage from "the Blue Cross":
"The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man; and standing on the slope and looking out across the valley, Valentin behold the thing which he sought."
Martin Gardner thinks this sentence is "arresting" and "beautifully worded." Well, Mr Gardner is a terrific maths writer, but before passing judgments like this he really ought to check out Chesterton's exact contemporary Saki, whose treatment of a parallel scene shows up Chesterton's shortcomings for exactly what they are:
"A dwindling rim of red sun showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing. Then the colour went suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and stopped running."
(Gabriel-Ernest)
Chesterton's schtick was to take Wildean paradox and level it at the lazy moralisers of his day - which is why his essay on Job is so sympathetic - and it's a great technique, works well on the Jehovah's Witnesses, but it's not quite the same thing as literature.
Another thing you've done is to accuse Agatha Christie of snobbery, as if this was somehow a literary defect. I'd say that actually a measure of snobbery in one form or another is more or less a prerequisite for writing good dialogue. Look at Alan Bennett. Well, look at Jane Austen, for that matter. Chesterton wasn't a snob, ergo he can't write dialogue. There's no nuance there, no insecurity. His characters don't converse, they lurch violently from one declamatory attitude to another. A typical piece of Chesterton business would go something like (I extemporise) '"But don't you see," cried out Father Brown in a sudden burst of desperate exultation,"it's all wrong."' The cumulative effect of this kind of thing is to leave the casual reader with the feeling that Father Brown's more excitable conversations are conducted in a series of hysterical shrieks.
And as for any suggestion that the Father Brown plots are varied, pfaugh. I once had an idea for a spoof Father Brown story that encapsulates every single real story in the canon. A horrible murder has been committed. The only four possible suspects are Cardinal Salvador Torturossa, Seamus "Psych" O'Path, Joey "the Shrimp" Gamberetti and the Revered Theophilius Thorogood, rector of Little St Mary's-near-the-Windle. "The answer is obvious," said Father Brown after a brief pause. "It was the Reverend Mr Thorogood. He's the only one who isn't a Catholic."
I agree with Hilary that snobbery (which I accused Agatha Christie of) has no bearing on literary merit, and that Chesterton's paradoxes become wearisome because so obviously contrived. I'd also agree that the Father Brown stories don't work as detective stories. Their resolution, which always involves insight into the human soul, sometimes requires inherently unlikely events (as in The Hammer of God) or, inexcusably in a detective story, information known to Father Brown but not to the reader (The Honour of Israel Gow).
But I disagree that Chesterton is a mediocre writer and a first-rate thinker. It's the other way round. He's a great writer with, in temporal matters at least, absurd ideas.
I know that many Christians, especially Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics, find Chesterton's religious apologetics valuable. They don't convince me, but theology - except where it relates to political issues or culture - isn't a subject for this blog. On politics, economics and social issues, the best that can be said about him is that while he was usually wrong, he was generally not as egregiously so as many other literary figures between the wars.
The late and brilliant Marxist theorist Paul Hirst wrote an illuminating book called Associative Democracy a decade ago that resurrected some little-known parts of English political thought. The book notes that:
Britain in the early twentieth century was particularly rich in attempts to find a 'third way' between the collectivism of state socialism and the unbridled egoism of laissez faire.
Hirst mentions Bertrand Russell's Roads to Freedom (1918), which advocated English Guild Socialism; the Arts and Crafts Movement, which posed co-operative colonies of artisans as an alternative to large-scale industry; A.J. Penty's The Restoration of the Guild System; and Chesterton, Belloc and the Distributists, who:
... argued that the prevention of poverty and the preservation of freedom could be assured only by the most widespread distribution of productive property possible, especially the land.
These neglected predecessors of the elusive Third Way maintained that workers' livelihoods were threatened by both collectivist planning, which would destroy political liberty in the attempt to cure poverty, and modern industry based on specialisation, which by severing the workman from the land deprived him of the means of an independent living. This concern about the threat to small communities is a continual theme of Chesterton's novels (notably The Napoleon of Notting Hill).
It's almost entirely nonsense. An advanced economy that provides its citizens with material advantages is liberating, not stultifying, because it enhances our ability to choose the good for ourselves. Chesterton didn't see the point at all. He was able to dismiss this process of bettering the lot of the people in the extraordinarily glib terms of a man unused to physical drudgery (in What's Wrong With the World):
Certainly we would sacrifice all our wires, wheels systems, specialities, physical science and frenzied finance for one half-hour of happiness such as has often come to us with comrades in a common tavern.
The best case you can make for this type of sentiment is that at least it didn't degenerate, in Chesterton's case, into romanticising 'blood and soil' as certain other literary figures did. There is an absence of the suspicion for the masses, and for democracy, that you frequently find among other Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic writers of the time (T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, most obviously).
There is fortunately little in Chesterton about agriculture other than a vague affection. In fact, the novels show a deeper tie to the suburbs. John Carey (The Intellectuals and the Masses) notes the intellectuals' scorn for the suburbs as the home of the mentally impoverished. Yet Chesterton's greatest novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, is set in a suburb, Saffron Park, which Chesterton presents as beautiful - 'as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset'. In it, the poet Gabriel Syme maintains to Lucian Gregory (who suffers from the totalitarian temptation of wishing to 'destroy the world if I could') the poetical qualities of - of all things - the underground railway.
Even then, Chesterton was himself touched by the totalitarian temptation. He visited Mussolini in the 1920s and came back - stupidly, inexcusably - enamoured. He wrote a terrifically silly book entitled The Resurrection of Rome, in which he had kind things to say about Fascist syndicalism, which he preferred to capitalism. Again, the best case you can make is that he was ignorant rather than malign. But he still sits in that repellent tradition of public figures who admired totalitarianism either of the Right, such as Ezra Pound, or of Soviet Communism (H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and the rest who travelled to the Potemkin Villages and came back with glowing accounts of happy and fulfilled proletarians).
One of the wisest judgements on Chesterton comes from a fine book, now some 30 years old, by John Gross entitled The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Gross says:
Chesterton's hatred of capitalism and his dread of the monolithic state were the generous responses of a man who saw the sickness of his society far more clearly than the ordinary Liberal and felt it more deeply than the self-confident Fabian social engineers. Unfortunately, though, a sense of outrage often proved as bad a counsellor in his case as it had in Carlyle's. His diatribes against usury and corruption were those of a man on the edge of hysteria; his anti-Semitism was an illness.
Chesterton was, unlike Thomas Carlyle as an old man (who stood at the gates of the Rothschilds estate hurling antisemitic imprecations), a man of generous spirit. But even once you've discounted the dark aspects that Gross mentions, you're left with an economic populism that is culpably naive, ignoring the role of the price mechanism and creating an image of Merrie England that never existed.
There is much that's worth reading in Chesterton. There's little, outside the quality of the prose and the love of literature, that can be learned from him in the realm of ideas.